On Thursday 10 October 2002 16:11, Jerry wrote: >Any suggestions on tape life expectancy. I am using >an 8mm AME with self-clean tape from exabyte and I've >got 2 bad out of 7 so far. I came into this job and >nobody knows if the tapes have ever been used before >but I noticed they were sitting on a window sill, >which is probably not the best thing for them. > >In general, do 8mm tapes last very long? I always >thought they lasted a really long time. Basically I >try to write to these 2 tapes and it either partially >writes and starts to rewind forever, or starts >displaying resets on my EZ17 autoloader. > >Jerry
Thats a bit of a hard question to answer, particularly if you don't know the tapes history, Jerry. I think I'd pick up another 10 or 20, replacing the ones you have which if just left laying on a window sill, without their little bookpack holders, are probably well contaminated by now. I'm using 4mill, DDS2 tapes here, 20 in a 20 day rotation, same 20 tapes for over a year now. I truely expect the drive to die before the tapes start falling over just because of the hours on the head by then. I saw some propaganda on DDS2 tapes once that said they were good for 10,000 passes. My only tape losses have been my own fault (you cannot bulk erase these DDS2's), or because a drive decided to rip it in two, with one exception from a stack of used ones I bought on ebay, I had to ditch one of those. But I made a little rack that holds them in the casette packs, 3 to a pidgeon hole, and they are either in their packs, or in the magazine. >__________________________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More >http://faith.yahoo.com -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.17% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
